This year's release of version 1.0 of the free runtime environment Wine is a milestone in itself. Developer Maarten Lankhorst has set another (experimental) stepping stone by getting the first 64Bit Windows program to run.

Hewlett-Packard has partnered with Novell in developing a new, secure Linux desktop product. At the same time, HP has joined up with Mozilla to promote a desktop virtualization project for small business customers.

In May 2008 at Linuxtag in Berlin, Nat Friedman had presented SUSE Studio, with which you can build your own Linux distro with just a few mouse clicks. SUSE Studio images are now available for the Eee 701 PC.

End of last week ARM Ltd and Canonical Ltd announced that they would port Linux to the ARMv7 processor architecture. If all goes well, the two collaborating firms should provide further hardware manufacturers with the basis to develop new, energy-efficient mobile devices, especially for the popular netbooks and so-called hybrid computers.